While I am void of any good screenshots for the text based-adventure I’m working on, I can take this time to talk about the programs I use for Flash game development at the office and home.  

Adobe Flash CS3/Flash CS4 has been the powerhouse for the past few years for my Flash production.  It’s expensive at $700, but it is by far the best tool out there. There are other programs out there that are free but most I have worked with don’t quite seem to do what I want.  It’s both drawing program, Actionscript coding environment, and test platform for your Flash projects.  They have a 30-day trial on the website so it’s worth checking out even if you want to see if Flash is a viable option.

Adobe Photoshop Cs3/CS4 have also been incredibly helpful as a graphics tool.  I primarily use Photoshop for manipulating photos as seen in Dark Cut 3, TBA2, etc.  The power of image editing becomes important when working with large backgrounds and bitmaps that Flash can’t handle too hot.  It’s also really good at sizing down screenshots and working with static images for the web, there tends to be a lot of different size images and screenshots for different websites.  It’s also $700, so once again check out the demo if you want to see it on your own computer.

Audacity is a free program I have been using for sound editing.  I typically don’t make my own sound effects but I have to edit my music and sounds somewhere.  This program isn’t terribly powerful but that’s exactly what I need.  Any bulging program would not play nice with Photoshop and Flash being open at the same time.

And with these three I’m pretty much set to take on a Flash game.

One other thing to note is that most Adobe products are only $200 with a student ID.  So if you’re jet-set on making a Flash game past the 30 day trial think about getting a student version of the program.

Back in 2006 I worked with over 50 authors on Four Second Firestorm, a large collaboration of minigames and ideas that work in 4 seconds.  It was a fairly large project full of terrible problems, it was a doomed shipped that stayed together with a combination of no sleep, beta versions of Flash 9 and panic.  It launched successfully at the time, but the file broke when Flash Player 10 came out.

I’ve been working in my offtime to get the file  back up and running.  Alas, after several tweaks and working with a near-impossible file I have compiled a slightly problematic working version!  It has some issues with sound and fonts (20 font familes are missing) but it’s the closest to working I have gotten it.  I’ll be working to get those missing fonts and seeing if I can fix up some of the greater issues.

Long story short, people with Flash Player 8 on their computers could open the file even though it’s Flash Player 9 and the game wouldn’t run corerectly.  In order to get people to upgrade we put in a version checker.  Little did we know at the time that the version checker only checked one digit… the 8 or 9.  When Flash 10 came out it nuked the file and no one’s FSF copies worked anymore.

Meanwhile Flash Player 10 seems to have done some more harm to the source code and the SWF.  Some things just aren’t working anymore, even though it’s a Flash 8/9 file and Flash Player 10 should have no problem with legacy.

The struggle continues, but the file is getting closer to being a good build again… still working on this thing three years later…